It’s Wednesday 29th of July 2009. We’re closing in on the 22nd hour of the day and I still have no clue what so ever, where I’ll be heading on the 1st of August. It could potentially be anywhere in the world. Crew Scheduling and their awesome piece of software – that unfortunately never works for us – have yet to publish more than 4,000 rosters. Cabin Crew for Emirates on the social networking site Facebook are getting more creative as the minutes go by. Going deeper in the meanings of their thoughts. Imagine. We do not go by a 9 to 5 job. We have long forgotten what a weekend actually feels like. We do not live by day names like Mondays, Tuesdays but rather by dates. We live at night most of the time because flights leave so early in the morning it is hard to keep track of which day you started your duty. Hence the “crazy/lunatic” state we are commonly seen in. We constantly have to look at our calendar in order to call Mother or Father on their actual birthday day. Gets a little trickier when we’re on the other side of earth.We eat, drink, live, play and breathe Emirates on a daily basis. It gets to you in many ways. Homesickness can strike at any given time. Like today. I had a 10 minute low and wanted to ditch this career and move on to something else. But the prospect of having my roster today cheered me up. Until now. I’m still here, refreshing those bloody annoying green boxes from hell. Thinking, magically, they will turn to either pink (good news), a string of a minimum of 3 blue boxes (very good news, this means I get a layover) or if worse comes to worse, a single blue box (turnaround = shit roster). I heard they’ll overwork us this month because they realised they sent too many people on Unpaid Leave. How genius is that !!??
Anyway. Still here. Still no roster. I’m giving up. I do like my job though, when things actually runs smoothly on the backend.
God didn’t actually command the publishing of rosters on the 26th, as I’ve previously mentioned on one of my Facebook statuses. In fact, he commanded that we had the desire to see them on that day and kept procrastinating. Keeping us hanging in there like daft morons.
That’s it. That was my rant of today ! Peace out fools.
And on the 30th day, there came to be rosters.
I hope.
How exciting not to have boring 9-5, Mon to Friday job! Don’t suffer any lows because you have no idea of what the day or date is!! At least you have the opportunity to get up on the other side of the earth!!…Now tell me group should actually be suffering from lows LOL
And I’ve noticed some FA’s grumble about their rosters, but at least you get a decent layover most of the times, while we just commute back and forth to work….So there now you should feel much better after reading this LOL
You at least have a calendar. Me, just the famous “Roster Information for the selected month in not available”.
It’s 5 am, I’m giving up by today.
PS: I’m actually on the A380 fleet, if you want some info about it…
uae tends to do that a lot nowadays. my mom, a retired nurse, isnt getting a full-month salary because the hospital screwed up and told her she had pending unpaid leaves and she could take the month off. turns out they were wrong and now they dont want to give my mom’s salary. tsk tsk.
i love reading your blogs by the way, gives me insight to what emirates cabin crew go through.
UAE : banana republic.